News LOL Game How did this happen: Alpha Twisted Fate

In ‘How Did This Happen,’ theScore esports takes a look back at some of the most busted, broken and insanely overpowered things to ever make their way into the world of competitive gaming.

League of Legends has never been the world’s most balanced game. Pick a time of day and Ryze is probably broken, there’s at least three champions who are perma-banned in solo queue, and five more who haven’t been picked in two years. But believe it or not, we’re far better off now than the sorry saps who played League of Legends in alpha.

Those poor, unfortunate souls had to deal with all manner of broken, nonsensical garbage. Case in point: Alpha Twisted Fate.

How did it work?

Twisted Fate’s entire kit in alpha is bonkers. His ultimate, Destiny, is the only ability that can still be found in his current incarnation, and even that is markedly different. Most notably, it didn’t have a teleport on it. Instead, his E was Gate, a global teleport with a three second cast time.

Yup.

TF had a Q that applied a damage-over-time debuff you could end early by disengaging with him and killing a minion, a W that you could toggle on and off to add a random amount of damage to your autoattacks, and an ultimate that gave you global vision and a 40 percent three-second slow on enemy champions.And if all that wasn’t crazy enough, he had an E that provided a three-second global teleport.

Oh, his three-second global teleport had the cast time halved during his ultimate.

WTF?

Needless to say, a three (and sometimes 1.5) second global teleport available at Level 1 is perhaps the craziest thing that you could ever give a champion. Seriously, the possibilities are endless. You could warp to any bush and drop a ward for your team to teleport to. You could gank the entire map, no questions asked. You could even show in a lane you weren’t actually in just to mess with your enemies. This of course got way crazier when your ultimate was up, since the halved cast time and global slow made those same infinite options all the more deadly.

Did you just respawn and need to help your team inside the enemy base? No problem. Do you want to one-man splitpush? Just build up a wave in one lane and warp to another to push that one. Hell, why would you even walk anywhere, just teleport back to lane to maintain a tempo advantage over anyone you’re laning against.

What happened?

Obviously, teleporting anywhere, everywhere, anytime could not last — but it didn’t get nerfed that quickly. TF kept his global teleport on E in the closed beta, but his ultimate was updated to make it an instant cast instead of giving halved cast time. By Season 1, Riot finally merged Gate into his ultimate and dropped the insane global slow. Though the new, ultimate version of Gate was still a global teleport, it wouldn’t get nerfed for a while.

There were other little changes to TF along the way. In the closed Beta he got his now trademark Pick A Card ability on W, while Season 1 gave him a gold-focused passive, like he has now. He also got Stacked Deck on E, replacing Gate as a standard ability, though it’s notable that Riot couldn’t come up with a new, castable spell to replace Gate.
Riot has washed a lot of TF’s checkered past off of the champion. They removed the racist slurs from his backstory, he doesn’t have weird blue zombie skin anymore and they even buttoned up his shirt so he’s not just all chest all the time anymore. But Riot can’t erase the traumatic memories of a Twisted Fate that was basically Nightcrawler, just teleporting all over the damn Rift.

Daniel Rosen is a news editor for theScore esports. You can follow him on Twitter.